23 April 2016

(Back
in the days when I first started teaching about writing, the early 90s,
the stat was 60%. That is, 60% of readers were women .)

Back to the Kobo study:
Of that 75% of readers who are women, 77% are 45 and older.

The largest single group (30%) are 55-64 years old. (I now fit in that age group. Curses.)

The reports states that the typical prolific reader (that would be me) buys on average 16 print books a year and 60 ebooks.

For all you math types, that's a total of 76 books.

Back up to my college class two weeks ago. I ran a quick poll. "How many books do you read in a year?" I asked.

The
poll was confidential. I ripped up pieces of paper and had them write
down their total. They dropped the anonymous slips on a table on the
way out.

The results were shocking. Let me state first
that this is a college credit continuing education class, so we have
students of all ages in it. Crafting a Novel is at the top end of the
Creative Writing Certificate - most people take it last, because it is
rigorous. (You have to write a full synopsis and many chapters of your
novel by the end.) So these aspiring novel writers would be avid
readers, right?

Books Read in a Year:

Most number of books read: 26
Average number of books read: 7
Least number of books read: 1

Yes, in a writing class of 20, only one person reads 2 books a month.
And one fellow manages to read one book a year. But he wants to write a novel.

By now, if you are a writer, you should be hitting your head against your desk.

So who is reading books out there?
Women
Aged 55-64

And what are they reading?
Romance
General Fiction (whatever that is)
Mystery
(But twice the number of romance books as the other two categories.)

I have 20 students in my Crafting a Novel class.
No one is writing romance.
No one is writing mystery.
Almost everyone is writing a Hunger Games clone. (Not the exact title. You know what I mean.)

Stephen King said it best. "If you want to be a writer, you have to do two things: read a lot and write a lot."

If you are an established writer, reading is part of your professional development. Every
published novelist I know reads several books a month. I read an
average of two books a week. That's over 100 books a year. (One hour a
night, people. That's seven hours a week. Not unreasonable.)

I
weep. I weep for the waste of time, effort and paper. Can somebody
please tell me why anyone would set out to write a novel when they don't
read and read and read as a hobby?

(Bad Girl isn't usually this grumpy. But it's marking time. I may just kill someone. I may kill myself...)